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Religion in American History: A Brief Guide to Reading

The opening sixteen words of the first amendment to the

Federal Constitution of 1789--"Congress shall make no law

respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free

exercise thereof"--anticipated religion's centrality to American

life in the coming centuries and reflected religion's complicated

history in the British colonial era. Scholars have followed the

evolving history of religion in America through excellent books

based on superb and innovative research. These books graphically

detail America's often powerful encounter with religion from the

sixteenth through the early twenty-first centuries.

Sydney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American

People, second edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)

has towered above all other general histories since its original

publication in 1972. Winner of the National Book Award in 1973

and simultaneously magisterial and limpid, Ahlstrom wrote at a

time when historians were expanding the story of American

religion beyond Puritans and Protestants to include the history

of Catholics and Jews in America and even the coming of the "New

Age." More modest historical surveys include Jon Butler, Grant

Wacker, and Randall Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short

History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), Edwin Gaustad

and Leigh Schmidt, The Religious History of America, revised ed.

(San Francisco: Harper, 2002), Winthrop S. Hudson and John

Corrigan, Religion in America, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan

Publishing Company, 1992), and George M. Marsden, Religion and

American Culture (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).

Catherine L. Albanese's America: Religions and Religion

(Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1992) describes

America's different religious styles broadly rather than

following a traditional chronological narrative.

Several collections of documents use original sources--

letters, diaries, documents--to reveal America's extraordinary

engagement with religion across the centuries. Edwin Scott

Gaustad and Mark Noll, eds., A Documentary History of Religion in

America, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans

Publishing Company, 2003) samples many different religious

traditions in America, and Catherine Albanese, ed., American

Spiritualities: A Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

2001) presents the many American traditions of religious

contemplation.

The religions of America's native peoples before and after

European contact have somewhat surprisingly received less

attention from historians than might be expected. Joel W. Martin,

The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) is one of the few

general histories of this important topic. Henry Warner Bowden's

American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural

Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), William G.

McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839 (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1984), and Francis P. Prucha, American

Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian,

1865-1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976) describe

the often vexed relationship between native groups and Christian

missionaries. Ramon A. Gutierrez vividly portrays Spanish-Indian

religious interaction on the southwest frontier in When Jesus

Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power

in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1991). Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of

the Ogalala Sioux as told to John G. Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow)

(New York: W. Morrow and Company, 1932) offers one of the most

famous portrayals of traditional Plains Indian religion and can

be supplemented usefully by Michael F. Steltenkamp's biography,

Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala (Norman: University of

Oklahoma Press, 1993).

Colonial and Revolutionary America

When Americans have thought about religion among America's

first European colonists, they often have thought of New

England's Puritans, a practice probably guaranteed by Nathaniel

Hawthorne's famous 1850 historical novel, The Scarlet Letter.

Indeed, historians have written so frequently on the Puritans

that Edmund S. Morgan has observed that we now know more about

the them "than any sane person should want to know." Morgan

himself is the author of several superb books on the Puritans,

and one of his best, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John

Winthrop (Boston: Little Brown, 1958), offers an exceptional

account of Winthrop's strenuous effort to perfect his imperfect

world. Darrett B. Rutman's Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a

Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1965), T. H. Breen's The Character of the Good

Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630-

1730 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), and Stephen

Foster's The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping

of New England Culture, 1570-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 1991) describe the Puritans' varied social,

political, and cultural achievements and failures. Perry Miller's

two volumes on Puritan theology and intellectual life, The New

England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan

Company, 1939), and The New England Mind: From Colony to

Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953)

indeed make challenging reading, but they still constitute the

single greatest achievement of scholarship in any field of

American history, not just religion.

Massachusetts's notorious 1692 Salem witch trials can best

be approached through Paul Boyer's and Stephen Nissenbaum's

account of personal disputing in a Puritan town, Salem Possessed:

The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1974). John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan:

Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1982) and Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's

Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 2002) discuss New England witchcraft accusations and Salem

in terms of Puritan psychology and Indian relations respectively,

while Larry Dale Gragg, A Quest for Security: The Life of Samuel

Parris, 1653-1720 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), describes

the sad life of the Salem minister who leveled the first

accusations against Salem's alleged witches.

Three books offer especially compelling accounts of religion

in New England in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth

centuries. Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee:

Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) and

Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public

Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1999) describe the way

religion fared in New England after 1680 using Connecticut as

their historians' laboratories. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good

Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New

England 1650-1750 (New York, 1982) explains how religion and

women affected each other in New England in the century before

the Revolution.

Frederick B. Tolles's Meeting House and Counting House: The

Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682-1763 (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948) still is the

best general account of Quakerism in colonial Pennsylvania. But

three newer histories supplement Tolles's account with fresh

research: Mary Maples Dunn's William Penn: Politics and

Conscience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) is the

best modern book on the founder of Pennsylvania; Jean R.

Soderlund's Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1985) offers a particularly good

Religion in American History - A Brief Guide to Reading.pdf

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